“Neither here, nor afterwards, beloved.”

“Then this is afterwards.  Heaven has nothing more to give.  What is Heaven?  The meeting of those who love—­as we have met.  I have forgotten what it was to live before you came——­”

“For me, there is nothing to remember between that day and this.”

“That day when you fell ill,” Unorna said, “the loneliness, the fear for you——­”

Unorna scarcely knew that it had not been she who had parted from him so long ago.  Yet she was playing a part, and in the semi-consciousness of her deep self-illusion it all seemed as real as a vision in a dream so often dreamed that it has become part of the dreamer’s life.  Those who fall by slow degrees under the power of the all-destroying opium remember yesterday as being very far, very long past, and recall faint memories of last year as though a century had lived and perished since then, seeing confusedly in their own lives the lives of others, and other existences in their own, until identity is almost gone in the endless transmigration of their souls from the shadow in one dream-tale to the wraith of themselves that dreams the next.  So, in that hour, Unorna drifted through the changing scenes that a word had power to call up, scarce able, and wholly unwilling, to distinguish between her real and her imaginary self.  What matter how?  What matter where?  The very questions which at first she had asked herself came now but faintly as out of an immeasurable distance, and always more faintly still.  They died away in her ears, as when, after long waiting, and false starts, and turnings back and anxious words exchanged, the great race is at last begun, the swift long limbs are gathered and stretched and strained and gathered again, the thunder of flying hoofs is in the air, and the rider, with low hands, and head inclined and eyes bent forward, hears the last anxious word of parting counsel tremble and die in the rush of the wind behind.

She had really loved him throughout all those years; she had really sought him and mourned for him and longed for a sight of his face; they had really parted and had really found each other but a short hour since; there was no Beatrice but Unorna and no Unorna but Beatrice, for they were one and indivisible and interchangeable as the glance of a man’s two eyes that look on one fair sight; each sees alone, the same—­but seeing together, the sight grows doubly fair.

“And all the sadness, where is it now?” she asked.  “And all the emptiness of that long time?  It never was, my love—­it was yesterday we met.  We parted yesterday, to meet to-day.  Say it was yesterday—­the little word can undo seven years.”

“It seems like yesterday,” he answered.

“Indeed, I can almost think so, now, for it was all night between.  But not quite dark, as night is sometimes.  It was a night full of stars—­each star was a thought of you, that burned softly and showed me where heaven was.  And darkest night, they say, means coming morning—­so when the stars went out I knew the sun must rise.”